Sima Qian, who today is accounted as one of the greatest historians who had ever lived and arguably one of the most important ancient Chinese historians, was castrated in 99 BC after defending a disgraced general. The general had surrendered and was thus charged by the emperor for treason, Sima Qian however defended him and wrote in a letter to a friend: "He is a man with many famous victories to his credit, a man far above the ordinary, while these courtiers – whose sole concern has been preserving themselves and their families – seize on one mistake. I felt sick at heart to see it," The emperor then declared that, the general had committed treason by surrendering. And Sima Qian had committed treason by defending him.
Rather than choosing the death sentence through suicide, which was the expected honorable route for a scholar, he endured the castration and imprisonment so he could survive and complete his monumental work, the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji).
Castration involved the total removal of both the penis and testicles. Because this severe surgical wound risked closing the urethra entirely, a bamboo tube (or sometimes lead/pewter) was carefully inserted into the open urethral stump. This tube was left in place during the healing process as a makeshift catheter, allowing the young man or adult to urinate without the stream causing the delicate, unsterile wounds to tear or become infected.
Sima Qian later wrote this about his castration: "Among defilements, none is so great as castration. Any man who continues to live having suffered such a punishment is accounted as a nothing. I look at myself now, mutilated in body and living in vile disgrace. Every time I think of this shame I find myself drenched in sweat."
by Sensitive_Educator60
5 Comments
We will always bear your sacrifice in our hearts, Sima. It wasn’t in vain.
>Because this severe surgical wound risked closing the urethra entirely, a bamboo tube (or sometimes lead/pewter) was carefully inserted into the open urethral stump. This tube was left in place during the healing process as a makeshift catheter, allowing the young man or adult to urinate without the stream causing the delicate, unsterile wounds to tear or become infected.
Imagine how many attempts, how much experience with the practice it took, to figure that out.
People can truly be beyond fucked up.
Which is odd because the emperor at the time was a magnificent one.
He wrote his work on bamboo slips that could each hold only 30 characters, yet somehow the work was probably the longest book in the world at the time by a good margin. It would have been something like 20,000 pieces of bamboo altogether and weighed more than a person.
I don’t love history that much